Interview with David Attenborough

(released by Arrangement with BBC Enterprises Ltd)

Listen to the interview filling in the gaps.

I: David Attenborough is very gloomy ___ . What’s depressed him most has been the huge speed and scale of change that human beings ___. A powerful symbol of that change is the simple act of ___.

A: In the Himalayas, for example, people cut down forests simply because there are an awful lot of people who need___. And so they cut down huge hillsides, in a few years… are stripped of their forests.

I: This leaves fertile Himalayan hills ___. The trees were umbrellas, but now the rain washes ___, which ends up as mud a thousand miles away in the channels of the river Ganges.

A: When the next rains come, instead of the forests on the hillside holding the rains and letting it out a bit at a time as though it were a sponge, the forest isn’t there, so the rain water runs straight off and when it goes down ___, and it gets into the channels which are clogged with mud, so it then floods, so then ___, people lose their farm lands and people drown.

I: So cutting down trees in Nepal ___. In Africa the gathering of wood is making the desert grow.

A: In parts of the Sudan, the desert in just 15 years ___. And it’s a… it’s a… devastating statistic and… what’s more, it’s a ___, because how can you go to these people and say, ‘You mustn’t cut down that three in order ___?

I: But is it ____ so bad? Or are some environmentalists just getting into a flap about isolated ____? David Attenborough used to wonder that, too.

A: I remember very well ____ for hour after hour and not a sign of the hand of man beneath me, just this green carpet of trees. And I said to myself, ‘It can’t be true, it can’t be true that this will disappear ___.’ And so I looked into the question as to how people made these estimates. I mean, I thought, was it one of these things where you suddenly multiply one statistic by 500 ____? The fact of the matter is that those statistics are based on ___ with infra-red cameras which actually measure the change of a patch of green leaves into a patch of bare ground. And even on that level the rate at which the jungle is being… er destroyed amounts to about 29.000 square miles in a year.

I: That’s an area the size ____ disappearing every year. Trees are a vital part of the water cycle, and of course they give us ___. And cutting down the rain forests kills the plants beneath the trees as well, plants which ___.

A: Forty per cent of our drugs, our medicines, are derived from plants and most of those come from the ____, and most of those come from the Amazon.

I: Those plants also help fight the diseases that threaten our food. The ____ that attack wheat, for example, are continually growing stronger. But they only evolve to match specific varieties of wheat. So plant breeders beat the funguses by changing the _______.

A: What does a ____ need to change a variety? Answer – new genes. Where do they come from? Answer – ____. That happens with all our food plants. With rice, with potatoes, with wheat, with barley, all that applies. And if we lose those wild strains, we could well be… devast… I mean, the field could be ____.

I: David Attenborough insists that none of what he’s said is ____. It’s not just a distant problem somewhere on the other side of the world.

A: What we’re talking about is the ___, of men, women and children. It is happening now. The floods that we hear of in India and Pakistan, the starvation that we hear of in parts of Africa, these aren’t ____. These are ___ of what we are talking about. And the tragedy is that the people who suffer first are the deprived people, the people who are living on the edge of ____. And, but if we think that we are insulated from that, that it’s always going to be them, we are wrong. They are the start. As sure as ____, they are coming our way.

I: David Attenborough’s thoughts after seven years of ____.

C.